(Phys.org) —In a bit of cosmic irony, planets orbiting cooler stars may be more likely to remain ice-free than planets around hotter stars. This is due to the interaction of a star's light with ice and snow on the planet's ...

If one looks only for the shiniest pennies in the fountain, chances are one misses most of the coins because they shimmer less brightly. This, in a nutshell, is the conundrum astronomers face when searching for Earth-like ...

(Phys.org) —The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted ...

(Phys.org)—In the last two decades astronomers have found hundreds of planets in orbit around other stars. One type of these so-called 'exoplanets' is the super-Earths that are thought to have a high proportion of rock ...

(Phys.org)—Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the ...

(Phys.org)—The mechanism by which water is incorporated into the terrestrial planets is a matter of extensive debate for planetary scientists. Now, observations of Vesta by NASA's Dawn mission suggest that hydrous materials ...

(Phys.org)—Exoplanet hunters estimate that there could be billions of super-Earths—planets with a mass of up to ten times that of Earth—orbiting stars in the Milky Way alone. But do super-Earths really deserve their ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A global collaboration including five University of Notre Dame researchers has revised the half-life of samarium-146 (146Sm), reducing it to 68 million years from 103 million years. The finding is published ...